Company store

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Company store in 1946, run by U.S. Coal and Coke Company, Gary, West Virginia.

A company store is a retail store selling a limited range of food, clothing and daily necessities to employees of a company. It is typical of a company town in a remote area where virtually everyone is employed by one firm, such as a coal mine. In a company town, the housing is owned by the company but there may be independent stores there or nearby. Company stores face little or no competition and prices are therefore not competitive. The store typically accepts "scrip" or non-cash vouchers issued by the company in advance of weekly cash paychecks, and gives credit to employees before payday. Except in very remote areas, company stores became scarcer after the miners bought automobiles and could travel to a range of stores. Even so the stores could survive because they provided convenience and easy credit.

Fishback finds that:

"The company store is one of the most reviled and misunderstood of economic institutions. In song, folktale, and union rhetoric the company store was often cast as a villain, a collector of souls through perpetual debt peonage. Nicknames, like the "pluck me" and more obscene versions that cannot appear in a family newspaper, seem to point to exploitation. The attitudes carry over into the scholarly literature, which emphasizes that the company store was a monopoly."^[1]

The stores served numerous functions, such as a locus for the government post office, and as the cultural, and community center where people could freely gather.^[2]

Notes

↑ Price V. Fishback, Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930 (1992) p 131
↑ Lou Athey, "The Company Store in Coal Town Culture," Labor's Heritage (1990) 2#1 pp 6-23.

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Company store

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